1st Place in my Age Division

This weekend is the 49th Annual Azalea Festival in a small, southeastern Missouri town called Fredericktown. The Azalea Festival includes fair rides, a 5K fun run, a 1 mile walk, a car show, a sand volleyball tournament, an arts & crafts fair, a parade, and a queen coronation, among plenty of other activities for kids and families.

Fredericktown’s population is somewhere around 4,000 people, and the town is the county seat of Madison County, Missouri. Despite spending many weekends in Fredericktown as a child, I’ve never been back as an adult to the Azalea Festival until today, when I ran the 5K and attended the Rotary Club’s fundraising breakfast at the United Methodist Church.

The 5K road race was held at 8:00 a.m., and despite cool weather and heavy rain, there were still probably 100 or so runners at the starting line.  I’ve started incorporating  speed work, yoga, strength training and resistance training into my training regiment to try to relieve pressure on my injured foot while strengthening some of the core muscles of my hips and thighs (thanks for getting me started, Pro Rehab!). I guess the speed work paid off, because I cut a couple of minutes off of my previous personal best 5K time today, and I won my age division.

First Place in Age Division

If you’re interested in getting more active or adding running to your lifestyle, small town races like this one are a really fun way to get started. From spring through fall in Missouri there are countless opportunities to sign up for fun run/walks of various distances (1-mile, 5K and 10K are some of the most popular distances).

The registration fees  for races like the Azalea Festival 5k are usually reasonable, you’ll feel your adrenaline pulse a little bit as you line up at the starting line with other people who are trying to stay healthy, and you’ll feel really accomplished later when you wear your race t-shirt. If you feel even the tiniest itch to get more active, I can’t encourage you enough.

Budweiser Clydesdales in Farmington, photo by smalltowngirl

I arrived at the Buffalo Wild Wings parking lot fifteen minutes before the end of the Clydesdale’s three-hour show — just in time to watch the handlers disassemble the horses’ rigging.  (If there’s a better word for the chains and hardware that hold the horses in alignment with one another, let me know.)

As a proper Missourian, I’ve seen the Clydesdales before, but I’d forgotten how truly impressive these animals are. At the top of the shoulder, they stand six feet tall. These horses weigh 2,000 to 2,300 pounds, and they’re unbelievably muscular.

Budweiser Clydesdales in Farmington, photo by smalltowngirl

The Clydesdales ride in style. In fact, I think the Clydesdales’ accomodations (see photo above) are fancier than my own digs. Their gigantic feet are the sizes of dinner plates, and the fluffy white hair (called feathering) on those ginormous feet makes me run for the hot oil treatments for my own lustry locks.

If you missed the Clydesdales in Farmington today, I’ve heard rumor that they’ll be in Fredericktown, Missouri tomorrow for the Azalea Festival.